Two Council members opt out of Parker’s plan to add apartments in commercial areas

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s latest effort to boost housing production in Philadelphia advanced at a City Council hearing Tuesday, part of her larger push to add 30,000 homes to the city over her tenure.

The bill allows properties with zoning that mostly applies to corner stores — known as CMX-1 — to allow additional apartments, depending on a building’s size.

The idea is to allow multiple apartments in larger buildings — where often only one is allowed now — and housing on the ground floor as well, especially in areas where commercial vacancy is high.

“We have a lot of vacant first floor commercial that just can’t be occupied,” Paula Brumbelow Burns, director of legislation at the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, said at City’s Council’s Rules Committee hearing Tuesday.

“This … can create more housing opportunities and use that space so we don’t have that vacancy at street level," said Brumbelow Burns.

But two City Council members plan to opt their districts out of this part of the mayor’s housing plan.

Councilmembers Brian O’Neill, who represents Far Northeast Philadelphia, and Cindy Bass, who represents much of Northwest Philadelphia, said they didn’t see Parker’s bill as a good fit for their districts.

“It’s really about community control,” Bass said after the hearing. “We’re hesitant to preemptively provide developers with this large development opportunity without having community input.”

Although the mayor’s bill considered Tuesday was transmitted to Council in March and officially introduced in May, it was not signed into law like Parker’s other zoning changes before the summer recess.

It has been delayed by concerns from Bass and O’Neill, who needed time to draw up plans to exempt their districts.

The opposition to a change like this in the city’s land use laws exemplifies why the politics of housing can be difficult to navigate and slow to generate results.

Parker’s zoning proposals are likely to create fewer units than hoped for and on a timeline long enough to do little to add to the mayor’s promised 30,000 new units during her term. Many other municipalities face similar challenges.

Parker’s team initially said the changes to the CMX-1 category would create the capacity to add 7,000 to 12,000 units across the city.

However, an analysis from the pro-development think tank Build Philly Now put the estimate at 17,018 across the city — with 5,863 units allowed in O’Neill’s district alone.

That’s because of an earlier effort by O’Neill to limit housing construction in his district. In 2022, he changed much of the neighborhood commercial zoning in his district to CMX-1, reducing the number of units that could be added along commercial corridors in the Far Northeast.

That also means that much larger properties have CMX-1 zoning in his district than in any other part of the city, and far more housing would be allowed on these mixed use commercial properties under Parker’s bill discussed Tuesday.

“Councilmember O’Neill has a [CMX-1] property that is 16 acres, and it would allow a remarkable number of units” under the administration’s bill, said Brumbelow Burns.

The long-standing tradition of councilmanic prerogative — in which district members are allowed wide latitude over zoning in their territory — means that the mayor has little power to fight O’Neill’s and Bass’s exemptions.

The City Planning Commission endorsed both exemptions, as part of larger changes to zoning overlays in the two Council districts.

Brumbelow Burns said the exempted districts generally have larger properties with CMX-1 zoning, which would allow a lot more housing than in other parts of the city under the mayor’s change.

“As we move farther out into other districts, the lots sometimes get bigger,” Brumbelow Burns said. “So we’ve been working with Councilmember Bass and Councilmember O’Neill [because they] have the larger properties that could have a negative impact.”

The exemptions raised questions from other Council members.

“There are other districts that have similar makeup, and I’m thinking immediately of my community in Wynnefield as an example,” said Katherine Gilmore Richardson, an at-large Council member. “This continues to be a challenge for us as well.”

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who represents much of West Philadelphia, tried to steer the debate back to the administration’s original intent, which is to add one or two more apartments to former commercial buildings that would otherwise be vacant.

“This just allows us to make use of the property in a way that reflects how our blocks and our communities actually function,” she said.

Parker’s bill and the legislation exempting O’Neill’s and Bass’s districts were passed by the Rules Committee on Tuesday. The bills could be voted on by the full Council and sent to the mayor as soon as Nov. 12.